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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy.

Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway.

Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately.

Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong, but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but will be more accurate its more of a psychology question than a technical question though.

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Human tallying is a source of errors, but it typically doesn't affect the outcome in major ways. This is more of an argument against large scale winner-takes-it-all election systems, as they have the least resilience against this kind of error.

The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. If this was indeed caused by fraudulent voting software, it happened without leaving any other obvious traces of tampering.

> Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud.

When and where was this?

It's being litigated, but in general the answer is there is not yet evidence that machine voting systems were compromised.

- in New York there is statistical anomaly correlated with a couple small-town polling stations. Those towns are small enough that they have a huge population of one religion, and one explanation is that the Democrat party's perceived "soft on Israel" stance tilted 100% of voters in those locations away from supporting the Democrat presidential candidate.

- in Pennsylvania a standard statistical analysis tool used to detect vote disruption suggested disruption occurred. The form of the disruption could be fraud, but it can also be things like voter intimidation (which was observed and reported in Philadelphia) and sudden discontinuity in voter behavior (the aforementioned "soft on Palestine" issue).

Correlation does not imply causation, and the lack of evidence of tampering of the machines in the audit logs is lack of evidence of tampering of the machines, not indication that the audit logs were compromised.

You can introduce procedures to minimize the error to a point that it’s not significant anymore.

Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.

I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country.

People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember.

To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on.

So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.

Yet there are many ways in which paper ballots can be taken advantage of. As an example do a search for Eastern European Carousel Voting[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting

It is not the paper ballots that's taken advantage of. They have no general public participation and opposition. The public simply do not give a damn about polling stations in places where Carousel voting is possible. There is no opposition observers or they cannot be because the examples in the Wikipedia page are dictatorships, not democracies. You cannot turn a dictatorship into democracy by voting.

Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.

> Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters

Yeah, do that by hand please, without relying on electronic means.

Paper ballots with "honour" based out of circumscription participation is not secure. My country also suffered from this issue and it's not an authoritarian regime. They fixed it by adding and checking IDs on a ballot participation list. Nobody explained how that works to the average voter.

What I was trying to underscore is that even for something that's presented as simple and fool proof as paper ballots one can find vulnerabilities, especially when you're dealing with nation level threats. So in my opinion we shouldn't ask electronic ballots to be more security than what is already in wide use.

And in fairness, electronic ballots don't need to be more (or as) secure as paper ballots, but 'mail in' ballots. If we can come up with a method that's as secure as mail ballots I'd call it a success, despite what Tom Scott says.

The more comments I read on this specific HN topic, the fewer people I see actually involved in the polling process.

I really recommend people volunteer for it, if you're American and you're concerned. All you have to do is call your county elections office; they always want more people. You get paid near-minimum wage and it takes two days a year, but that's it.

What you will discover is that most of what people are asking for in this thread is stuff the states of the United States already do.

If a person is deeply concerned how the election is run? Go get involved. It's your country and your election system.

>> It's impossible to cheat at scale

Elon did it, and they both bragged about it, publically.

Isn't our source on Elon cheating at scale... Elon?

Why do we believe the liar on this topic?

>Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints.

Humans just need to be able to separate a few hundreds of ballots into a couple of piles. When introducing double checking this makes an incredibly rigorous process, which can be open to the public. This is the case here in Germany.

Everything after that can be done by computers as all the data after that is published.

These system used for voting means that humans don't hand tally hundred of millions of votes. They tally those in a voting district only. Those them get aggregated with other districts and so on until the whole states and then the country is counted.

The problem with the accuracy assumption of electronic voting is that a) its all coded without errors and b) someone hasn't deliberately but code into manipulate the vote numbers.

We have good reason to believe a is true and b is false; the machines get tested to death before election day.

As mentioned in the video, there is no amount of “testing” which could prove the absence of malicious software or hardware. None.

That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing.

If you're saying we should be writing voting machine code in ML and keeping the firmware in Fort Knox, I'm going to make the argument that it's a lot cheaper to do sampled hand-counts to check against machine error or tampering... Which we already do.

> That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing.

It doesn't because even with unit and integration testing, software still fails and get hacked/exploited on a regular basis. What's worse with software voting is that a single good exploit could affect all the votes.

It really can't. What is the mechanism by which it could? Different states use different machines and each individual machine is airgapped. A general supply chain attack would show up in statistical sampling audits (i e. hand recounts of small numbers of ballots, which we already do).

User name checks out.

I mean, you left yourself open to that glib, low-effort criticism when you wrote this:

> no software or programmable hardware

That's obviously too stringent. Consider:

1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet.

2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader.

Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links!

Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.

Indeed. That is what I was responding to; if I over-assumed the GP's position, my apologies.

We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election).

If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason alone) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception").

Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.

If your proposed process is implemented, it will take about 5 seconds before the precinct realizes that they can just feed it all to the machine and sign whatever number which comes out as the “hand-counted” one. Especially as they will be dinged whenever their count differs from the machine, which will be assumed by their superiors to be more trustworthy.

More seriously, even though some cars are programmable, I did not mean that nobody could use cars to transport ballot boxes. I obviously meant that the official results should be the manually-counted one; machines could conceivably be used to get interim results faster, and/or to double-check a count to see if it needs to be counted again. But I was serious about requiring absolutely no machines involved in the counting of the official results.

Most states (I don't have all fifty states' laws in my head) have a sample recount process; they generally trust the machine numbers but they will randomly sample some percent of precincts for a detailed hand-audit count. Any attempt to generally infect electronic systems falls afoul of this back-stop.

In addition, most states have a mechanism by which a candidate can formally challenge the results in a precinct, forcing a hand-recount. This usually has some kind of onus on the requester (I believe in PA for example you have to put up a bounty and if the hand recount results come out to the same result as the previous tabulation the state keeps the bounty as payment for the added cost of the forced audit). However, it is an option (and, most notably, not an option that anyone who claimed shenanigans in 2016 or 2024 exercised).

The problem of election integrity doesn't exist in a vacuum and didn't pop up overnight in 2016; states have been working the issue for a couple centuries and have a pretty good system. But it's a system that requires some detailed statistics and process control theory to understand, so I'm not surprised the median voter doesn't get it. There is, perhaps, a case to be made that for that reason alone we should go to manual, but someone's gonna have to spend the money on that if we're going to do it; it's going to be drastically more expensive than electronically-facilitated counting. And, indeed, people will have to accept that human counters will be less accurate than machine counters (because they're human; we don't train "computers" anymore as a discipline).

> they will randomly sample some percent of precincts for a detailed hand-audit count.

This places a lot of trust in that “random” selection.

That's an industry-standard quality control approach in almost every supply chain. Proven approach.

Not sure why you're scare-quoting random. Do you have reason to believe it's not random?

> industry-standard quality control ... proven approach

proven for the private market(s) != proven (or even acceptable) for governments

do the risk analysis. what happens when an industry-standard quality control measure fails in whatever way for a private company? some hit to their reputation, stock price, market share, maybe they even fail. these are perfectly acceptable outcomes for a private organization. they are not acceptable outcomes for governments. governments demand (much) higher standards and more stringent processes. slowness is a feature, not a bug.

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